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Changes to the Process Templates between VS 2012 Beta, RC and RTM

This blog post is for the people who started using the Beta or RC version of VS 2012 and created projects in either of these versions that are still active.

In case you want to update your work item types to the level of RTM, you can do two things:

If you have made no customizations to the work items in the team project, you can extract the work items from the process template and use witadmin to overwrite the work item types.

If you have made customizations you can either follow step 1 and reapply your customizations, or you can apply the changes that we have made to the work item types from Beta and RT to RTM.

If you want to follow step 2, here is the list of changes that we have done:

From Beta to RC

When we shipped the Beta we wanted to hide the ‘complexity’ how the items are prioritized on the backlog from the user by not showing the field on the work item form. From feedback we found out by not showing the field, it was not possible for the user to prioritize the backlog with the keyboard. So we added the field back to the work item form.

All templates

Made the Assigned To field required when it is in the Active state in the Feedback Response work item type

Agile

Added the stack rank field to the form in the User Story work item type

CMMI

Added the stack rank field to the form in the Requirement work item type

Scrum

Added the backlog priority field to the form in the Bug and Product Backlog Item work item type

From RC to RTM

Auditing is an important part of the process templates. When we created the scrum template we wanted to be as close to the scrum philosophy as possible, which resulted in not having a closed date on the task. From feedback we heard that people found the auditing story broken because they were unable to see when tasks were closed.

The other feedback we heard is that people did not like the default text in the description field for the User Story or the Product Backlog Item, which was an inheritance of 2010. In TFS 2012 it is super easy to add items to the backlog, but you only set the title. As you start grooming the backlog and add more information to the items, the items had that default text in it which people did not like.

Being restricted was a trend we saw five years ago, but in this era of agility and lean we see the trend of less restrictions in the software teams. In the RTM templates we started to listen to that trend by allowing more transitions.

Agile

Made the closed date field required when it is in the closed state

Removed the default value from the description field when creating a new user story

Added the transition from New to Resolved to the User Story

Scrum

Added the transition from New to Committed to the Bug and Product Backlog Item

Added the Closed Date field to the Task, including the logic to set it in the correct states and transitions

Removed the default value from the description field when creating a new Product Backlog Item

Harry,
I have added a link to the References section to find information how to delete a process template. If you have downloaded the process template on your local file system, you can go to the sub folder "WorkItem TrackingTypeDefinitions" to find the work item type definitions of the process template.
You can then use witadmin importwitd (the other link in the references section) to import those work item types. You have to do that for every team project that you have created for Beta or RC.
Ewald Hofman